A nitride semiconductor including nitrogen (N) as a Group V element is a prime candidate for a material to make a short-wave light-emitting device because its bandgap is sufficiently wide. Among other things, gallium nitride-based compound semiconductors (which will be referred to herein as “GaN-based semiconductors” and which are represented by the formula AlxGayInzN (where 0≦x, y, z≦1 and x+y+z=1)) have been researched and developed particularly extensively. As a result, blue-ray-emitting light-emitting diodes (LEDs), green-ray-emitting LEDs and semiconductor laser diodes made of GaN-based semiconductors have already been used in actual products (see Patent Documents Nos. 1 and 2, for example).
When a semiconductor device is fabricated using GaN-based semiconductors, a sapphire wafer, an SiC wafer, an Si wafer or any other appropriate wafer is used as a wafer on which a crystal of GaN-based semiconductors needs to be grown. No matter which of these wafers is used, however, it is always difficult to achieve a sufficient degree of lattice matching between the wafer and the GaN-based semiconductor crystal (i.e., to realize a coherent growth). As a result, a lot of dislocations (including edge dislocations, spiral dislocations and mixed dislocations) will usually be produced inside the GaN-based semiconductor crystal and will have as high a density as approximately 1×109 cm−2 when a sapphire wafer or an SiC wafer is used, for example. Consequently, an increase in threshold current and a decrease in reliability will be unavoidable as for a semiconductor laser diode, and an increase in power dissipation and a decrease in efficiency or reliability will be inevitable as for an LED. Also, some existent GaN wafers may certainly have a lower density of dislocations but its crystal would have a lot of residual strain. That is why even if a GaN-based semiconductor crystal is grown on such a wafer, it should be difficult to go without experiencing a similar problem.
Thus, a so-called “epitaxial lateral overgrowth (ELO)” technique has been proposed as a method for reducing the density of dislocations in a GaN-based semiconductor crystal. Such a method will effectively reduce the number of threading dislocations in a system with a high degree of lattice misfit. If a GaN-based semiconductor crystal is grown on each of the wafers described above by ELO, the upper part of the seed crystal will have a region in which there are a lot of dislocations at a density of approximately 1×109 cm−2, but the density of locations can be reduced to around 1×107 cm−2 in a laterally growing region. And if an active region, which is an electron injected region, is defined over such a region with a fewer number of dislocations, the reliability can be increased.